In this remarkable column, a Catholic priest from Maryland interviewed 50 young adults whose names are on the roll of his parish about why they don’t go to church. As he notes with commendable honesty, their answers revealed deep alienation from Catholicism; they are not ignorant about the church’s teaching as much as they […]

Alan Jacobs posted a few questions in response to my essay on Matt Walsh that others have also raised on Twitter, Facebook, etc, so I answered them below. I will update this post with any further clarifications that come up. (Alan’s questions in bold italics, my responses beneath.)

Here’s a safe assumption: most people in the Western world believe in at least one pervasive, life-defining myth. This myth underlies our daily lives. Where we live and work, who we associate with, and how we define ourselves are shaped by this myth. I could very well be talking about religion, and certainly life in the […]

American evangelicalism is anti-intellectual. Such a view has enjoyed fairly wide currency since Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen attempts to correct this view, but not by rejecting it outright. She shows how American evangelicals have been engaged in a range of intellectual projects – institutions, magazines, […]

Yesterday, I tweeted some uncivil things about Rod Dreher in response to his response to the synod announcement of a new tone—and possibly more than that—toward gay relationships. Even though, as many people critical of my rant pointed out, Dreher was arguing that he should have a more merciful perspective, […]

You may think you’re sitting at your computer (or staring at your phone) and browsing the internet, but you’re actually wandering around in the wilderness. Think Moses and the Israelites in the desert post-Egypt, pre-Promised Land. Or, if you prefer a less Biblical analogy, think Odysseus making his 10-year journey back to Ithaca. […]

Below is the email I sent to the trustees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in response to the firing of professor Steven Salaita over his controversial tweets. Corey Robin has done some heroic work combing through the latest documents that show intense outside pressure on the administration to […]

I began my media career about seven years ago as an unabashed internet enthusiast. As I’ve said before, I never worked in print journalism and had little nostalgia for the world that was entering free fall as I did my first internship at an online publication. By then, the internet had already provided […]

As reports trickled out of northern Iraq last week about the living hell that ISIS had brought to earth for hundreds of thousands of Christians and Yazidis, one detail kept coming up in the stories that haunted my social media feeds: They’re beheading children.